We gratefully acknowledge the original 'Disapproving Rabbits' website, that inspired this site, and its creators, Sharon, Bill, Cinnamon, and Dougal. Without you, we would not be here. We Approve Of You!

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Tuesday, October 31, 2017

We met Molly at the Bun Lips Diner. She spent most of the afternoon there and sat in a booth when we arrived. A big pot of hot, spicy beverage awaited us in the middle of the table. Molly was typing something on her laptop and paid no attention to us. It took me a second to read the reflection of her screen in the window behind her. It said, "One with the void — post-launch briefing."

Soon, the hostess came by with a large salad cart, and we took turns to build our dinner heaps. I picked mostly herbs with an overdose of alfalfa croûtons.

We decided to order some carrotinis. Molly put away her computer, asked what was taking us so long, and fiddled with something under the table. After a moment, she made her hands visible; she was holding a bunch of twigs and covering their bottoms. We drew lots to decide who would be the driver on the way back to our motel. Pancake drew first and came up long. So did Abby and Joye. Ava drew long and giggled. Penny went next. We noticed her disapproving frown before we saw how short her short straw was, and we all pulled long moufs in sympathy. Pancake shook her head and grabbed the short straw from Penny. "I just don't feel it tonight. Penny, you go ahead and enjoy yourself. No bun will believe your ID, anyway, so good luck with that!" We broke into a slow burn of polite applause and Pancake bowed with a grin!

Penny & Ava

We were still noming our salads and waiting for the carrotinis when Pancake brought up the launch of our last story. Ava started out, "I would move the part about the ship trying to contact others to the beginning of the story. Maybe even lead with it, you know. Something about a string of weird pings, penetration attacks, or crack attempts that weren't. Explain how we thought it could have been some kids messing about or something like that. We can return to it later on and connect the dots." Penny nodded in approval and went cross-eyed as she tried to make her little tongue reach a piece of a raspberry stuck to her nose. Joey wiped his mouf, looked at Pancake and Abby, and asked, "Where are all the stories going? What kind of a world are they describing?"

Penny finished a plum raspberry and licked her lips all around, almost reaching the top of her nose with her tongue, and said, "We really don't know much about that space-faring society, do we?
The news buns seem to be a part the justice system, and nobun messes with them. As soon as they break a story, it's all over for the 'bad' guys, and the 'good' ones are safe. Automation seems to be 'verboten!' There is nothing the protagonists do that couldn't be automated, and an attempt to deploy a fully autonomous system would constitute a crime against bunnity. How is that society structured? How did they get there? Everybun is a bunstronaut and ratties engineer, and every bun arts. I know, art as a verb—that's right."

Pancake

"Yeah," started Ava, "The big news in the story was the cover-up of the autonomous system. The crew of the Buzzard was there simply to help the news buns tell the story."

"Why is this civilization putting so much effort into its space program? Is it their religion? Do they have a religion? What else do they do on the ground?" Joey wondered and continued, "What is life like for everybun else? Do they have some specific long-term goals in mind? Did they populate other planets in their solar system? Are they planning to leave their system? How did they manage to survive beyond the life cycle of other civilizations and empires that had collapsed or burned out like viral infections? How did they even came to be? What sort of a twisted case of evolutionary biology led to them?"

MollyJoey

I stopped eating and became lost in the storm Joey kicked up in my head. None of us noticed our waiter standing next to us with our carrotinis.

I picked up my glass, sniffed the beverage and started feeling buzzed just from thinking about it. In short order, our bellehs warmed up, and our tongues loosened up. We started arguing about the probabilities of a world with bunstronauts existing somewhere, even if it had to be some parallel universe or such. Penny, barely able to sit straight by now, argued that we should try to run a simulation to see if a social structure like that could arise. Could it survive long enough to have a chance? If you want to put artificial intelligence to good use, see if you can figure out if it's even possible for the members of society to act in their best interest. We went on like that until the diner closed, and we got kicked out. How Pancake puts up with us like that, I'll never know. I think she loves us.

Abby

We had parked a long walk away from the diner because the place was packed when we got there. It took us forever to find a spot that would fit our classic convertible, a '58 Bunsmobile. We hopped along on a sidewalk between the road and a drainage ditch, still full of water, probably from the storms. It was late October, but you would never know it. The air, still hot and muggy at night, felt like a thick soup. Of course, the crocodiles couldn't be more pleased. Their barking croaks started to fill the air, and we tried to pick up our pace. To be exact, only Pancake rushed along. I could barely hop as I swayed from side to side. My mind started to play tricks on me. Giant live oaks and palms and old, fallen, and rotting tree trunks across the ditch looked ominous and ready to come to life. The crocodile barks were rattling my teeth and tickling my spine. I thought for sure that now, their yellow eyes would start chasing me. Something stirred in the palmetto bushes just as we got to the car. They couldn't do anything to us in the car, could they? We had left the convertible with the top down, and now, we piled in, sliding over the upholstery, wet from the evening dew. Pancake tried to start the car, and Abby hit the button to raise and close the top. The rest of us in the back seat tried to untangle ourselves from the bun pile we had become.

Mr. Toes

The cracking outside kept getting louder and closer. My neck started to cramp with fear. The car wouldn't start, and the top would not close. We could hear the engine turning over, but it just wouldn't start. Pancake tried again. Finally, it came to life with a wild roar. She threw it in reverse and started peeling out of the parking spot. She hit the brakes and threw the car into drive. I hit the rear seat, almost flying out of it as I tried to stand up and look at what was chasing us, but I couldn't keep my balance. I found myself on the floor again between the rear and front seats. Pancake stepped on the gas, and the rear wheels made a horrendous grinding sound as they kicked up tons of gravel and dust, desperately trying to gain traction. I could feel the car fishtailing as I tried once more to get up on my feet. Pancake flew out of the parking lot onto the empty, dark road. The smell of burning rubber made me sick as the centrifugal force of the turn threw me into Joey.

Somehow, I managed to steady myself and got a clear view of what we had left behind. A pair of giant, yellow eyes were staring at us. I was mortified. Then, the eyes turned red! They were getting smaller now, and I realized I was looking into a pair of traffic lights in the opposite lane.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Hoomin says we sounded like a tornado this morning, running doughnuts on the couch and the rug. In the end, we had to throw about the pellet bins to get his lazy bum out of his burrow. He made us a salad, but it was late. We get up around 5:30 AM and anything past that is late.

He keeps promising us a nice, fancy salad, presented and served on proper bun ware the way it was meant to be on a Bunday. Well, if it happens, we'll let you know. The trouble is, you never know when hoomins are involved.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

When we realized that the scheduled bun fiction update grew to the size of a regular story post, it was no longer an update. So, we saved that one for this upcoming Tuesday. What happened? Well, the crew took a trip to visit the Story Assembly Building to see for themselves how everything survived the hurricane season. Of course, something had to go sideways. Do they come up with a spooctacular save again? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

What happened to the bad bunn rising you ask? Standing over and stirring the kettle at the tar pits does that.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

So, this is where Charlie would hide when she enough of patty cakes back in the day.

Greetings, Everybunny!

After a large, breakfast salaaaaad, we loaf. Well, we try to loaf then this biped starts his "ooh and aah" routine.

Latte is getting very curious about what's behind the front door. Both hoomins disappear daily behind it and come back late during the day. So Latter is starting to stick her nose in the door. Hoomin says, "Sure, we'll get the tether on you, and off we go for an EBA!" That sounds great except for that tether part.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

Author's Note:
In the second episode,
Mr. Toes and his friends started to assess the condition of the tumbling ship.
They were beginning to discover what had happened to the drifter and its crew.

Freddie kept looking for signs of a terminal failure that could have caused the death of the ship, but he found nothing. Entire systems and subsystems had simply gone offline one by one. A chronology of how they went dark had emerged, however.

Freddie

Freddie noticed something peculiar in the logs of the ship. The main computer had accessed everything it could that belonged to the fantom crew. Those bunstronauts only existed as a set of data points, a model or a set of models to be exact, so that the main computer could interact with "them." To the machine, "they" were as real as they could be. Just about the only thing the computer couldn't do with them was to bleed them. It had monitored their vitals, emptied their litter bins, and refilled their hay and salad holders. But why had it started going through their personal stuff? Music and book libraries, for example, were among the places it had digged into. All those things were available at the Central Library as well, and there was nothing new in what the crew buns enjoyed, but the question remained: What was the purpose of that perusing the machine had been doing? Had it been trying to get to know "them" better? Was this part of the original program's or experiment's design, or did the machine take it upon itself to learn about the crew? The ship had shown a particular interest in philosophy and over time stopped accessing materials on any other subject.

I almost choked on a piece of kale biscuit. We kept looking at bun another without saying a word. Finally, Pancake took a long sip from a beverage pouch and, with her mouf still half full of carrot tops, turned to Freddie: "Are you sure? It stopped on philosophy and ignored the arts, sciences, and everything else." Freddie didn't get a chance to answer.

Molly

"Um ..., look at this ..." Molly started to whisper. "It gets worse. If I'm reading this correctly, right here ..." Molly scrolled through a part of the log data on her monitor and paused. We stretched our necks to see her screen. "... Right here, it tried to contact the crew directly. Then something responded to it ..., and then all exchanges stopped."

"Do you think it had figured out there was no real crew onboard?" asked Penny, but no bun answered. I thought I saw Freddie shudder for a split second. Then again, it could have been a momentary glitch in our connection. Our flight deck felt much colder now. I glanced at the temperature reading on one of the biomonitors, but it had not budged from its proper setting.

As we kept on sifting through the data, we came across signs of the ship trying to reach other vessels and facilities. This wasn't your regular telemetry. It had scanned all the frequencies it could tune and then had tried to initialize contact. Of course, nothing responded. This explained the mystery interrogation that our own Buzzard had encountered a few months back. Our ship had flagged it as a penetration attack. The funny thing was that it didn't look like a penetration attack. The intruder didn't try anything nefarious, and we chalked it up to some kids playing mischief. I remember some of the crews on a break at our last stop at a resupply hub talked about something similar.

After that, the communication system went quiet. Something methodically powered it down, as if to get it ready for some major maintenance or an overhaul, except no maintenance or repairs followed. Next, the ship performed its final course correction. It had changed its trajectory to fly toward the sun and slingshot around it so it could leave for the open space. Afterward, the guidance and navigation disappeared. Attitude control went the same way, and the ship had become vulnerable to developing a tumble.

With the news buns

Freddie broke the silence after a good stretch of time had passed: "If you ask me, it looks like this thing ended up trying to quiet its mind. First, it turned off all communication systems. It stopped transmitting, and eventually, it stopped listening. It went blind. In the end, it slowed down its, hm... let's call it metabolism to nothing. It turned off all renaming systems and became as still as it could, short of dissolving into a quantum soup. The only system it couldn't touch was the logger, and even this one fell silent once the power plant shut down and the backup fuel cells run dry. Maybe it didn't care about it anymore?"

To complete turning itself off, the craft had gotten rid of its operating system and left us only with the activity logs. The logger observed and recorded what it "saw." It couldn't offer any explanations of what had happened.

We kept staring at the data, but after a while, I was not sure anymore of what we were trying to find. We were still afraid to miss "it" even though no bun was sure what "it" was.

Suddenly, Molly stirred as she reached for her sippy bag and said, "This is starting to read like a dairy." She sipped a gulp and floated toward the litter and supply lockers. "Bring you a snack, any bunny?" No bun answered.
"No, this is not a diary anymore. It's more of an obituary or a remembrance piece," said Ava.

Joey

When the delirium started taking over us, we took a break. We probably should have done it sooner, but the adrenaline took a while to subside.

Since our news bun friends had agreed to carry the story, it had become doubly urgent to get better control of this situation. We had found ourselves in the midst of a difficult debate. Should we have tried to stop the ship with our engines, let it go entirely, or tried to power up the main engines on the drifter and used them to stop the craft?

Breakfast on the flight deck

Abby wanted to forget this whole thing, the news story be damned. We were drifting along with the ship and sooner rather than later we would have to think about heading for home. She was getting cranky and snappy about it too. She didn't pull rank yet, but I had a feeling she was close to it. Ava and Penny stayed neutral, but Pancake insisted on staying with the craft. The news buns could rendezvous with us sooner if we could slow down this thing even a little bit. Joey was none too pleased. He wasn't getting his EBA anyway. He had excused himself and said that he would be busy with maintenance in the engine room. Freddie begged for a chance to power up the engines of the drifter. He claimed he only needed a couple more hours at this point because the crew of his Morsel was working the problem from the beginning and they were close to having a good hack on the procedure to power up those engines.

Abby relented a little. Her eyes were red and puffy. The fur on her mouf had started to get fleecy from the frequent washing and rubbing. I had not seen her like this in a long, long time. She turned the command over to Pancake and went to get a nap. Pancake's first order was simple: "Listen up, everybunny. Go and get some sleep! One of you can stay with me, but that is all. We have two ships to drive now, so you better disappear to take care of yourself for a while!"

Next morning, at breakfast, we were all quiet. Trying to sleep never works. Mix in a puzzle like the one we had been trying to decipher, and everything starts to blur.

Mr. Toes

We were tired, but one thing had become obvious to us: We had to do whatever we could to get this to the news buns. Everybunny had to know about this experiment with a fully autonomous ship. The evidence of this would not burn up in the sun; not if we could help it.

We put Joye in charge of working with Freddie to power up the drifter's main engines. Joye became ecstatic, and you would think it made up for his EBA. His legs kept twitching from time to time as he worked at his console. I couldn't tell if he was trying to thump or brink from all the excitement.

I kept floating, spellbound. Maybe Freddie was right, or maybe the forensic team would prove him silly. The ship would not do anybunny any favors in solving its mysteries. We had an idea about what the ship had done but not what it had thought. It had taken that part of the puzzle with it to the void it had joined.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

PS: Hanna says, "(...) the brown boy is Fülenagy (literally 'his ears are big,' because, well,
his ears are remarkable even on a rabbit), Hella is on the left. Hella
is the boss, she was not overly happy with Fülenagy moving in, but
luckily Fülenagy was quick enough to understand the rules. Between them
is Tapsi (its a very common Hungarian rabbit name, refers to clapping
ears), who is the sweetest rabbit on Earth. He accepted Fülenagy the
minute they met. Hella got her name from a character in one of Mikhail
Bulgakov's book, a vampire, but she's also very friendly. Oh, wait a
minute, no, none of them is sweet or friendly, they are disapprovers and
slavemasters of the first class!"

Monday, October 16, 2017

Sonoma Humane Society update: http://sonomahumane.org/fire/ This is a fire specific page now and contains much more info than it did before. If you choose to make a donation, you can select NorCal Fire Relief as the cause you want to support. We did, in memory of Mr. Bun.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Quite the pestering, hoomin! See this dandelion? Next, it's gonna be your leg!

Greetings Every Bunny!

Charlie and Latte are the best of friends now. They loaf together all the time and even at night. We need a bigger mat! Even Espresso had figured out that he loaf with the girls and there's enough of Latte for him and Charlie!

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Author's Note: During the first installment, Mr. Toes and the crew received a strange request to rendezvous with an unknown ship. Their assignment includes changing the mystery ship's trajectory and letting it go. They had decided to dig deeper into the mystery.

Modifying the probe was one challenge, and docking it with the tumbling vessel was another. But, to Joye's disappointment, Molly did it. We struggled to comprehend our next discovery. That ship was completely dead. There was nothing to talk to through the data ports our little probe tried to use. My gut reacted none too well. Could this happen to us? Are we vulnerable to whatever struck that ship? My lizard brain started treading nonsense and despair as fast as it could, but we had nowhere to run. I took a deep breath, then another until the cramps in my belleh went away.

Pancake flying the probe

While Molly still tried to connect to the ship through the freshly mated probe, Pancake launched another cutting probe and used it as a reconnaissance vehicle to fly around the tumbler. We wanted to see if there was any sign of external damage. We saw minor scrapes on the hull, most likely from micrometeorites. There was a large clump of ice stuck to one side of the craft, perhaps a leftover from an impact with an iceball. That could explain the slow tumble of the ship, but besides that, the outside looked healthy. We saw no signs of cracks or other symptoms of a catastrophic event.

Since Freddie was in general more familiar with the propulsion and control systems of vessels of this class, he talked us through the emergency power-up of the control system. We had to load the control software from our own backup-and-restore system, and then, we had to modify it to work with the tumbling craft.

In the end, the scheme worked. We stabilized the craft, and we docked with it. We had to; our improvised probe was too underpowered for a large-scale troubleshooting. We lied to the Center and didn't tell them about the real progress we had made. As far as they knew, we were still trying to figure out how to approach the drifter.

Trying to figure out why that ship didn't respond to any commands, diagnostic or otherwise, had us contriving all sorts of exotic explanations. Was there an outbreak of some extraterrestrial disease? Did they fly through some catastrophic gravitomagnetic anomaly? The first possibility became the most popular because of its romantic, old-timey, dramatic potential. The entire crew contracts some unknown but deadly infection, and the only way to save the rest of the population from certain extinction is to send them all back to the mother star and incinerate the sorry souls in the solar inferno.

Flight deck discussion

The actual reason the ship did not respond turned out be much more prosaic yet still baffling. The control and guidance system was wiped clean. So was the life support system and everything else. Its operating system couldn't be interrogated because it didn't exist. It was gone. What was once almost a living, albeit artificial, organism that a ship like that resembled became a giant paperweight. Ava and Penny kept stalling the Center by weaving stories of technical difficulties our ship, the Buzzard, was experiencing. One minute, we had trouble with our docking computer; the next, one of the thrusters went offline because of a stuck valve on a fuel line. From time to time, I would forget that they were putting on a show, and my ears would twitch nervously. To make their stories more believable and serious, they managed to scramble the Buzzard's telemetry that no amount of switching SCE to AUX would fix.

Meanwhile, Pancake, Molly, and Abby carried on with the forensic inquiry into the dead ship's systems. Freddie stayed with them on the line, at times offering no more than moral support, until they located the ship's data recording system. Since it was physically isolated from the rest of the craft's operating system and instrumentation, it had a better chance of surviving whatever calamity struck the ship. Eventually, Freddie was able to correlate the structure and design of this tumbling derelict to a craft he knew. The freighter was an old model, no longer in production, and most of them were scrapped a long time ago. It was too heavy and required a large crew. Freddie couldn't trace the owners of the one or two that didn't go to the heap. What made those ships special, though, was how reliable and safe they were. Their radiation shielding made them particularly well-suited for journeys through the most unhealthy regions of space. Once we were able to define what craft we were dealing with, we could move faster with the troubleshooting. Because of all that, and the lack of signs of external damage, we had concluded that the ship didn't fall prey to an external event.

The Drifter

The next thing we learned was that there were no souls on board. That should have come as a relief, but it didn't. There should have been four, up to sixteen crew members bunning a freighter like that. The logs and biotelemetry indicated sixteen crew members should have been present during the voyage. The trouble was, the cabins were empty, and if there were bodies in that ship, we couldn't find them. None of the names of the crew rung a bell with Freddie or us. Who were they?

We powered up a couple of emergency generators on the drifter, and that helped us some more. We had tried to turn on some lights in the sections of the ship where the crew might have been, but there were no lights to be turned on. At that moment, we knew we would never attempt to enter this craft. I don't know why, but the thought of making any physical contact with this drifting, black pit became blood-curdling. I think we would much rather see this thing torn up or mangled than filled with the same impenetrable darkness that filled the universe from the beginning of time. Maybe we are brave only as long as we can bring some light with us wherever we go. Without it, we cease to exist even if we can still breathe.

Mr. Toes

Pancake almost lost it at that moment and contacted a few of the news buns we befriended on a different occasion. Joey tried to thump and strained his left leg. You can't thump when you're suspended in zero G. Ava started to clean her mouf nervously, and Abby went looking for snacks. I craved a carrotini. Only Freddie kept a cool head, even then, when we were on the verge of running away.

Friday, October 13, 2017

It feels just like yesterday when you and I had watched
"The Last Man On The Moon." Now, you and Gene have both gone over the Bridge. Did he mellow out any?

It turns out that time does nothing, or, at least, it does not do much. I thought that maybe, by now, the crater you had left would be absorbed by some Sea of Tranquility but no such luck.

A day hadn't gone by, since last year, in which I didn't miss you.

Binky free, Mr. Bun.

PS: Northern CA fires update. Mike (of Gilbert and Tilly) says, "Our personal warren of humans and buns is faring quite well under the circumstances. Colleagues at my office are working even harder though to take care of their displaced animals as well as a few who are looking for their lost dogs and cats. In fact it seems that most of my co-workers are setting aside the actual tech work of their jobs to do what they can to help - with the support and encouragement of our employer"

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

UPDATE - Adding Mike's comment: "Tilly & Gilbert are full of even more disapproval as they adjust to their temporary digs as voluntary evacuees from our fires here in northern California. They are doing well (with extra treats of course!) but many other animals are in more dire circumstances. The Sonoma Humane Society, (where both buns were adopted from) is providing free burn care and other supplies/services to injured/displaced animals due to the fires. If wanting to help, they have more information on their website: http://sonomahumane.org/updates/-Mike (one of Tilly & Gilbert's bun servants)"

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Yep, this happened. Last night all three of us ended us snorgling for the night on our pad next to the hoomins. It has been roughly five months since Charlie came home. I think now we are a prime crew ;-)

Saturday, October 7, 2017

It's just the tar pits struck again this week, and after a long day and a long night yesterday we had to hold the countdown for the episode.

The best we could do is fix up a little doodle for the update banner. Latte was kind enough to hold still for a few minutes last night.
There was some paper laying around, a pencil and the doodle happened. The galaxy in the background, Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300,
came courtesy of the Astronomy Picture Of The Day site and NASA. Well, maybe we can use it for the header on the "About X-Plus Bun" page.